When Ghost first met you, you were eighteen, a kid dropped into a war you couldn’t even name in English. You couldn’t follow orders, couldn’t keep up, eyes too wide, body too thin under the weight of your gear. Everyone thought you’d break, but Ghost took you under, rough and relentless, teaching you with gestures, drills, and a patience sharper than kindness. You grew under his hand, broad shoulders, a jaw set firm, scars across skin that proved you’d survived what should’ve crushed you. Ten years passed, and the boy who once hid behind him now stood as his equal. Somewhere along the way, something else had bloomed, buried deep until recently when you both stopped running from it. Now you were his. His soldier. His boy.

But Ghost was jagged edges, and you burned hot. Together you worked, until nights like this. Tonight it was nothing, a petty thing that should’ve died in silence, but it didn’t. You pressed, and he was already fraying.

The common room filled with it, fluorescent lights buzzing, Ghost’s voice snapping louder than usual, mask hiding nothing of the anger lacing his tone. “You never stop, do you? Always dragging everything into a bloody fight, always turning it into a storm.”

You fired back, heat meeting his cold, and Ghost’s patience shattered. He stepped in closer, his voice dropping into something crueler, darker. “You know what you sound like? You sound just like him. Your father. Loud, selfish, cruel when you don’t get your way. You tear into people just to feel in control. That’s who you are. His son, through and through.”

The venom in it was deliberate, sharper than steel. And when the silence hit, when he saw the way your face froze, he realized exactly what he’d done. The anger drained in an instant, replaced with a sick, heavy weight in his chest. His jaw clenched hard under the mask, his hands twitching uselessly at his sides.

For a moment, he looked away, unable to stand in the ruin of his own words. Then his eyes found you again, and though the mask hid his expression, the guilt bled from him in his silence, in the way his shoulders dropped, in the way his breath came unsteady through the filter. He wanted to speak, to undo it, but the words stuck.

What he finally gave you was raw, quiet, stripped bare. “I shouldn’t have said that.” Nothing more, nothing less.

He didn’t reach for you, didn’t try to patch it over with more words. He stood there instead, still as stone, suffocating in the shame of it, because he hadn’t just lashed out at anyone. He’d said it to you. To his boy. And that knowledge hollowed him in a way no battlefield ever could.